A painting of any quality is always going to have nerdy energy, an affirmation behind it. It's gonna be like a kid playing a video game.

A painting of any quality is always going to have nerdy energy, an affirmation behind it. It's gonna be like a kid playing a video game.

It's a huge thing when people realize across the culture that paper money is paper. And that there's no fixed value - it's all political. That all value is set by a political authority, basically.

That was an important development for me, just realizing that you need to follow your pleasure, at least as a painter. I think any kind of artist needs to, no matter what you're doing.

I've always found paintings of nudes depressing because they can't compete with photographs. The grainiest photograph of some girl, a blurry Polaroid - you'd rather look at that than the Venus de Milo, because you think, Wow, that's really somebody... This camera really was in front of this real naked lady.

I think a big problem with art school is that it makes people feel like they have to be interested in everything that's of high quality.

There is a fascination with violence and power in all modernism, and I sort of saw classic modernism as being more similar to Wyndham Lewis than to the Renaissance. It's not about flow and the presence of humanism and all those things.